Beate Grawemeyer

Developing IDEAS: supporting children with autism within a participatory design team

IDEAS (Interface Design Experience for the Autistic Spectrum) is a method for involving children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the technology design process. This paper extends the IDEAS method to enable use with a design team, providing specific added support for communication and collaboration difficulties that may arise. A study to trial this extended method was conducted with two design teams, each involving three children with ASD, in a series of six, weekly design sessions focused on designing a math game. The findings from this study reveal that the children were able to successfully participate in the sessions and collaborate with other children. The findings also highlight the positive experience that involvement in such a process can offer this population.

Using and managing multiple passwords: A week to a view

Security policies are required that protect information from unauthorised access, and also respect challenges users face in creating, and particularly managing, increasing numbers of passwords. This paper investigates real password use in the context of daily life. It presents the results of an empirical study where participants completed a password diary over 7days, followed by debrief interviews to gain further knowledge and understanding of user behaviour. The results reported relate to how many passwords are in use, the types of passwords participants created, the relationships between different passwords and to sensitive services, how participants retrieved their passwords and finally, the different strategies adopted by users in their management of passwords. The paper concludes by providing a high level set of password guidelines, along with suggestions for mechanisms to support creating, encoding, retrieving and executing multiple passwords.

IDEAS: an interface design experience for the autistic spectrum

Designing products and services to meet the specific requirements of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be difficult due to their wide ranging and individual needs. Participatory Design (PD) is a design method that could be used to better meet these needs, by giving this population an opportunity to directly contribute to software designed for their use. Researchers have begun to involve children with ASD in the design process, but there is not yet a design method specifically adapted to support the potential difficulties this group may experience during PD sessions. This paper presents a new design method, IDEAS, which attempts to fulfill this need. The development of this method is described along with an initial pilot undertaken to determine the feasibility of using this method with an ASD population. The results indicate that the majority of children with ASD were able to produce a successful final design using this method, and have the potential to be involved in PD sessions as part of a design team.

Rational security: Modelling everyday password use

To inform the design of security policy, task models of password behaviour were constructed for different user groups-Computer Scientists, Administrative Staff and Students. These models identified internal and external constraints on user behaviour and the goals for password use within each group. Data were drawn from interviews and diaries of password use. Analyses indicated password security positively correlated with the sensitivity of the task, differences in frequency of password use were related to password security and patterns of password reuse were related to knowledge of security. Modelling revealed Computer Scientists viewed information security as part of their tasks and passwords provided a way of completing their work. By contrast, Admin and Student groups viewed passwords as a cost incurred when accessing the primary task. Differences between the models were related to differences in password security and used to suggest six recommendations for security officers to consider when setting password policy.

Developing an embodied pedagogical agent with and for young people with autism spectrum disorder

This paper describes how we developed an embodied pedagogical agent (EPA) with and for young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD is characterised by impairments in social communication, imagination, and perspective-taking, which can compromise design and collaboration. However, if an ASD preference for visual processing can be supported by providing images of design ideas as they develop, these difficulties may be overcome. We describe a methodology that successfully supports the visualisation and development of EPAs using our prototype visualisation tool (EPA DK), enabling ASD users to function as active design participants.

The Effect of Knowledge-of-External-Representations upon Performance and Representational Choice in a Database Query Task

This study examined the representation selection preference patterns of participants in a database query task. In the database task, participants were provided with a choice of information-equivalent data representations and chose one of them to use in answering database queries. A range of database tasks were posed to participants – some required the identification of unique entities, some required the detection of clusters of similar entities, and some involved the qualitative comparison of values, etc. Participants were divided, post hoc, into two groups on the basis of a pre-experimental task (card sort) designed to assess ‘knowledge of external representations’ (KER). Results showed that low and high KER groups differed most in terms of representation selection on cluster type database query tasks. Participants in the low group tended to change from more ‘graphical’ representations such as scatterplots to less complex representations (like bar charts or tables) from early to late trials. In contrast, high KER participants were able to successfully use a wider range of ER types. They also selected more ‘appropriate’ ERs (ie. ones that the diagrammatic reasoning literature predicts to be well-matched to the task).

Knowledge-based document analysis

The performance of document analysis systems significantly depends on knowledge about the application domain that can be exploited in the analysis process. Typically one has to deal with different sources of knowledge like syntactic knowledge, semantic knowledge or strategic knowledge guiding the analysis process. We present a knowledge based document analysis system based on tasks. It allows to model and to interpret structural knowledge about documents and knowledge about the analysis process declaratively in a common framework.

Affect Matters: Exploring the Impact of Feedback During Mathematical Tasks in an Exploratory Environment

We describe a Wizard-of-Oz study that investigates the impact of different types of feedback on students’ affective states. Our results indicate the importance of matching carefully the affective state with appropriate feedback in order to help students transition into more positive states. For example when students were confused affect boosts and specific instruction seem to be effective in helping students to be in flow again. We discuss this and other effective ways to and implications for the development of our system and the field in general.

Purpose and Level of Feedback in an Exploratory Learning Environment for Fractions

This paper reports on our progress on a systematic approach to operationalizing support in Fractions Lab – an exploratory learning environment for learning fractions in primary education. In particular, we focus on the question of what feedback to provide and consider in detail the implementation of feedback according to two dimensions: the purpose of the feedback, depending on the task-specific needs of the student, and the level of feedback, depending on the cognitive needs of the student. We present early findings from our design-based research that includes Wizard-of-Oz studies of the intelligent feedback system and student perception questionnaires.

Deficits in metacognitive monitoring in mathematics assessments in learners with autism spectrum disorder

Children and adults with autism spectrum disorder have been found to have deficits in metacognition that could impact upon their learning. This study explored metacognitive monitoring in 28 (23 males and 5 females) participants with autism spectrum disorder and 56 (16 males and 40 females) typically developing controls who were being educated at the same level. Participants were asked a series of mathematics questions. Based upon previous research, after each question they were asked two metacognitive questions: (1) whether they thought they had got the answer correct or not (or ‘don’t know’) and (2) whether they meant to get the answer correct or not (or ‘don’t know’). Participants with autism spectrum disorder were significantly more likely than the typically developing group to erroneously think that they had got an incorrect answer correct. Having made an error, those with autism spectrum disorder were also significantly more likely to report that they had meant to make the error. Different patterns in the types of errors made were also identified between the two groups. Deficits in metacognition were identified for the autism spectrum disorder group in the learning of mathematics. This is consistent with metacognitive research from different contexts and the implications for supporting learning in autism spectrum disorder are discussed.